While life without the world’s favourite microblogging service feels unimaginable now, it’s not actually been around that long. It was only invented in 2006, and it wasn't until 2010 that it really started to get popular. It just seems like we’ve had it forever because it's a natural progression of all these previous ways people used to share short messages with the world…

Church signs

With an in-built character limit and space for a bio, the only reason churches aren’t everyone’s medium of choice is the difficulty of carrying one around in your pocket. If someone had invented really big pockets in about 2005, nobody would know what Twitter was.

Really wordy t-shirts

Whether you’re proud of being a Female Body Inspector or want to make it clear you’re not as think as people drunk you are, your torso goes with you everywhere, making it the ultimate mobile social platform.

Toilet graffiti

You can really specifically your audience with toilet graffiti, pinpointing the demographic you most want to horrify/insult/proposition. Going after the coveted 18-25 market? Just draw a picture of your willy in the toilets of a student pub, scrawl your phone number next to it and you’re done.

Back tattoos

Retweeting something takes a fraction of a second, but before that, if you saw a back piece you completely agreed with the sentiment of, you had to drag the owner into a tattoo shop and shout “Bro, do the same on me”.

Bumper stickers

In many ways, cars and iPhones are similar – they’re status symbols which lose their value incredibly quickly, they’re fairly shiny and they sometimes crash. Car bumper stickers are hard to update on the move, but honking pretty much equates to favouriting, and having your bumper stolen counts as a retweet.

LED belts

If you’ve ever worried that your body isn’t putting out enough of an “under construction Geocities page” vibe, these muthas’ll sort you right out, broadcasting a message of up to 256 characters (80% more than Twitter allows!) to anyone that chooses to read your groin.

Sandwich boards

Ellen DeGeneres’ Oscar selfie from last year is the most retweeted tweet ever – if sandwich boards were the medium of choice, “The End Is Nigh” and “Will Work For Food” would only recently have lost their crowns to “Golf Sale”.